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North Korea’s nuclear winter

President George Bush wants to topple the North Korean regime, and has total disregard for South Korea’s attempts at reconciliation. He is risking the safety of both Koreas, and causing alarm in China and Japan.

by Bruce Cumings 

THE Bush administration is, like the early Clinton administration, mired in a major crisis with North Korea: it’s as if a Nietzschean genie indulging the eternal recurrence of the same were running the global show. As it was in the early 1990s, the policy of the United States is stuttering, confused and confounded. Yet the current international crisis over North Korea’s nuclear programme is more dangerous than events of a decade ago.

In 1991 the administration of George Bush senior became concerned about activities at North Korea’s graphite nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon. But since the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) gives rights of self-defence to non-nuclear countries under nuclear threat, the US had to clear its own nuclear weapons out of South Korea: nuclear artillery and land mines, atomic gravity bombs, and Honest John rockets (dating from 1958) - before it could do anything about the North’s programme. Bush senior inaugurated the first high-level talks with Pyongyang, and the US weapons were removed shortly before he left the White House. The new diplomacy was halted, though, when Bill Clinton took office in 1992: he was focused on the economy and paid no attention to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Six weeks after Clinton’s inauguration, North Korea, to get his attention, declared that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were doing the bidding of US intelligence, announced its withdrawal from the NPT, and mobilised its formidable propaganda apparatus, warning that sanctions imposed by the UN security council would be an act of war. The late Kim Il-sung detonated a crisis that lasted 18 months, culminating in May 1994 when North Korea dumped 8,000 fuel rods from the reactor, containing enough plutonium to make five or six atomic bombs. In June Clinton nearly went to war. Fortunately, former president Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang to talk directly with President Kim and gained a commitment to a total freeze on the (...)

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Bruce Cumings

Original text in English

* Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago. His book, ’Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations’ (Duke University Press, London, 1999) has an extended analysis of the first crisis with North Korea

(1) See Bruce Cumings, “Dangerous dynamics”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, May 2001.

(2) Contrary to what Bush spokesmen say, there is nothing in the agreement prohibiting uranium enrichment, but North Korea certainly violated the spirit of the agreement.

(3) Bob Woodward, Bush at War, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002.

(4) Chicago Tribune, 4 April 1994. In a memorandum to the UN, 10 April 1996, North Korea stated that “a second Korean war would have broken out had the United Nations chosen to repeat its past by unilaterally imposing sanctions.”

(5) I was told this on a not-for-attribution basis by Joel Wit and Robert Gallucci (Galluci negotiated the 1994 agreements with Pyongyang; Wit was one of his deputies), at a conference in Washington on 9 January 2002.

(6) Condoleezza Rice, who produced the September 2002 document on preventive war, explained that preemption is anticipatory self-defence; in the document itself it says other nations “should [not] use pre-emption as a pretext for aggression”.

(7) The New York Times, 9 July 1996.

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